American Contributions to the 14th International Congress of Slavists. Ohrid 2008

Convergent and Divergent Innovation in the Belarusian Dialects of the Bialystok and Hrodna Regions: A Sociolinguistic Border Impact Study

Christina Y. Bethin, ed. American Contributions to the 14th International Congress of Slavists, Ohrid, September 2008. Vol. 1: Linguistics. Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 245–64. Convergent and Divergent Innovation in the Belarusian Dialects of the Bialystok and Hrodna Regions: A Sociolinguistic Border Impact Study* Curt Woolhiser 1. Introduction The far-reaching socio-political and economic transformations that have occurred throughout Eastern Europe over the course of the last half-century have had a profound effect on the region’s linguistic landscape. The processes of industrialization and urbanization, often accompanied by ideologically inspired government policies designed to hasten the demise of traditional peasant society, have led in many areas to the rapid displacement of traditional rural dialects and frequently to the emergence of new, mixed dialects that have yet to be adequately described. These linguistic changes, in turn, are emblematic of significant shifts in social, regional, and even ethnic identities among newly mobilized rural populations. Despite these fundamental changes in the region, students of Slavic dialectology have for the most part continued to operate primarily within the traditional dialectological paradigm, focusing their attention on the least innovative speech of the oldest, least mobile members of rural communities with the goal of reconstructing the linguistic past. The problem of linguistic change in progress, and the sociolinguistic and language-internal mechanisms which motivate it, has yet to receive sustained, systematic attention on the part of Slavists.1 The dialects of Belarusian are of course no exception to the tendencies of dialect convergence and attrition noted above, which are in a sense part of a pan-European phenomenon that cuts across the former divide between the capitalist West and so- * Research for this paper was supported in part by grants from the International Research and Exchanges Board (with funds provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the U.S. Information Agency), the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the University of Texas at Austin. None of these organizations is responsible for the views expressed. 1 In the context of Belarusian dialectology, an important exception to the general lack of interest in contemporary processes of dialect change is Kurtsova’s (1990) study of Russian influence on a rural dialect in the Homel´ region of eastern Belarus, one of very few studies of Slavic rural dialects applying sociological methods to the study of linguistic micro-variation. 246 CURT WOOLHISER cialist East.2 However, while convergence with a standard language or regional colloquial variety has been the characteristic fate of many Slavic rural dialects over the course of the 20th century, the dialects of Belarusian are perhaps unique in that their corresponding standard has exerted considerably less influence on them than the standard languages of neighboring speech communities, that is, Russian and Polish. The paradoxical status of the modern Belarusian language and its dialects comes into sharpest focus in the case of the indigenous Belarusian dialects of the northeastern Bia!ystok region in Poland and the western Hrodna district of Belarus. While these dialects previously constituted a single dialect zone, the territory on which they are spoken was divided after WWII by a relatively impermeable border between the Polish People’s Republic and the USSR (since 1991 the independent Republic of Belarus ). The comparatively recent separation of these dialects by a political border makes it possible to investigate in real and apparent time the impact of the imposition of different standard languages on speakers of a non-standard dialect and the operation and interaction of micro- and macro-sociolinguistic factors, as well as languageinternal developmental tendencies, in the process of dialect-standard convergence and the rise of new mixed vernacular language varieties. The contemporary Polish-Belarusian border region is also of considerable interest in that most of the rural population on both sides of the border has only recently, within the last two to three generations, begun to acquire a clearly defined sense of national identity that transcends traditional local or religious foci of selfidentification , and in which language—particularly the codified standard “national language”—has acquired an important symbolic function as a marker of membership in a broader national community. The situation is further complicated on the Belarusian side of the border by the largely unequal competition between two closely related standard languages, Russian and standard Belarusian, for functional and symbolic dominance. In this paper I will discuss some of the findings of a sociolinguistic study I conducted from 1996 to 2000 in a number of Belarusian-speaking villages on...